Xu Yang

Spanning painting, photography, performance and mixed media, Xu Yang’s practice explores notions of identity, queerness, femininity and fetish. Her work details a personal journey of discovery, inspired by the sudden culture shock she experienced when relocating to London from Zibo, a small city in China’s Shandong province, nine years ago. Having transitioned between two entirely different social contexts, Yang is acutely aware of the plasticity of identity. While living in London, she experienced a period of becoming, affirming her queerness and commencing an art practice predicated on depicting and embodying deliberately, feminised, even fetishized, characters.

Having been raised in an intensely conservative environment, Yang has found artistic and personal solace in portraits of women spanning the history of art. In engaging with these depictions, Yang often finds elements of her own experience reflected back to her. As an individual who has felt confined and silenced by the world around her, she has found a particular affinity with 17th and 18th century women of the French court. In her work, she often mirrors the way in which these women found routes to self-expression and individualised identity through their aesthetic presentation. Allusions to both French Rocco painting and fashions of the period can be found in many of her works. Yang is also greatly influenced by great female artists of the past, who have situated themselves within their work as modes of self-affirmation, such as Frida Kahlo, Elizabeth Le Brun, Angelica Kauffman and Artemisia Gentileschi.

Alongside portraiture and performance, Yang creates highly-detailed and intricate still life works as meditative explorations of identity as expressed through objects. Combining quotidian objects, such as fruits, insects and vermin, with ostentatious symbols of wealth and femininity, such as wigs, tiaras and jewels, Yang creates provocative and dreamlike compositions that hint at the multifaceted nature of her experience and personality. Through the everyday, she alludes to feelings of neglect and invisibility, meanwhile the ornate and bejewelled elements speak to the construction of a specific self-image for the eyes of another.

Across her immensely symbolic and involved practice, Yang consistently engages with the history of European art. Moving between irony, appreciation and aggrandization, and often implementing age-old techniques and materials, Yang’s work imagines new forms of femininity while harking back to paintings of the past and mediating on the experiences of women and queer people through the ages.